Archive for the ‘critters’ Category

Nobody has moved into any of my fence birdhouses yet, alas. I will try putting a few up under the eaves in the shade. Cornflowers came up nicely this year, though!

We had another of our spring heat waves this past week, with daytime temps in the high 90’s (F) and daily watering to try to save young plants. The timing was spectacularly bad: traditionally US Mother’s Day is the time to set out tender plants like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. Many seedlings had only a few days in the ground before the heat slammed into us. This meant that their root systems weren’t necessarily developed sufficiently to support the plant during a time of great stress.

More seedlings waiting for kinder weather, or for me to finish preparing the other beds.

I had to spot-water my teensy pepper seedlings in the mornings all week, and hope that providing water directly at the plant would provide a margin of safety. I lost a couple of them anyway, but the majority are good so far. The peppers I transplanted a few weeks earlier into my hydroponic trays, however, adored the hot weather and doubled in size during the past week!

A pair of sweet pimiento peppers flank a ping tung long eggplant.

Other heat-lovers included the basil in my new blue herb planter. It’s an ordinary strawberry pocket planter, which I populated with kitchen herbs rather than strawberries. I moved it into ‘bright shade’ during the heat wave, as the herbs were planted only a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to be sure they didn’t cook in the planter. I really recommend making a planter like this, so you won’t have to constantly police your herb bed to keep some of the busy herbs like sage or oregano from crowding out and overshading others. My tiny 2 square feet of herb bed had sprawled to over 9 square feet through the fall and winter, and I had to cut it WAY back a week or two ago to get good access back to the fence.

Dual pockets of basil, plus sage, marjoram, italian oregano, and a crown of english thyme.

Normally I’d have beans by now, but I was late to the game and didn’t plant my usual Monte’s Italian heirloom (a variety of borlotti bean). The pill bugs, aka “The Eaters”, have been wreaking havoc on bean seedlings of all kinds, eating away parts of the stem until the leaves hang by a tiny thread. Of a dozen bush bean seedlings, only two have survived so far, and they seem to have gotten 4 of the 6 Monte’s Italian that I planted a week or two ago. I need to get some diatomaceous earth and hope that slows them down. I should also be ‘baiting’ with melon rind, or a saucer lid, or other thing they can hide under so I can remove them. Gotta get on that!

At least my painted lady runner beans came back on their own, an annual that goes perennial in this mild climate. They stopped setting flowers during the week of insane heat, but should get back to it now.

It wouldn’t be a garden update if it didn’t have a shot of our Garden Helper, usually found napping on the job. It’s better than sitting by the bird watering area, thinking impure thoughts, so I won’t complain.

Hey, when you’re this gorgeous, you need to really max out on the beauty sleep!

Our bestest buddy the Booster is doing really well and has regained much of the weight she lost this past fall, when we feared the worst. None of the tests we ran turned up anything: she was pronounced incredibly healthy for a 13.5 year old kitteh, but she was growing noticeably skinnier and I could feel more bones along her back.

I started reading the labels on the canned food, the treats, and dry food in the pet store. The dry food has 2 to 2.5 times the protein of the canned stuff, and more carbs, and the treats were similar. I wondered if the canned food was simply not providing enough protein and carbs to maintain Boo’s muscle mass and keep her warm during the colder fall/winter weather. I got some high-quality dry food and started offering them free-choice dry food again. They were all over it with great enthusiasm.

When I listen to sidewalk, I can hear ocean! … What you mean, no?

Within the week, Boo stopped losing muscle mass. Her hind legs, which were getting so thin that I could feel the tendons near her paws, plumped up again. She’s regained all her muscle mass, though not much fat, and her neck and back are noticeably more muscular. I’m really shocked that high-end canned food made with good ingredients is not enough to keep her healthy. I am very glad that she is fine again, and kind of shocked and scared that I could have been accidentally starving her! OK, not *starving*, the vet said that she was a far cry from that, but it was a startling change in Boo that I picked up on pretty quickly.

All’s well now, but I wanted to post about it in case other folks’ aging kittehs are starting to get bony. Don’t just chalk it up to the aging process. See if different or better food, or combinations of food, will work. Feed high-energy treats like Greenies, bits of cheese, etc, to help your fuzzball build up strength. And don’t give up! I look forward to many more happy years with the Booster Bunny. They don’t stay with us forever, but we want them with us as long as possible, as long as they are still enjoying being here. She’s back to her sassy self!

Boo is 13 now, and will be 14 in June. She’s been losing weight noticeably. We had blood work done, and it came back with all ok– not thyroid, liver function, or diabetes, any of which can cause weight loss in older cats. Meanwhile, her coat is still thick and glossy and soft, and when she was in for her annual in September, the vet and the techs all said she seemed like a much younger cat than her age.

I took Boo in for an x-ray today. She’d lost another quarter-pound, in just 2 weeks, but nothing obviously wrong on the x-ray. The doctor will call me tomorrow (her regular doctor wasn’t in).

The vet-tech said that she is not bony; she sees really emaciated cats and Boo is nowhere near there. Boo was 13+ pounds over a year ago, and her weight has been slowly and steadily coming down since we took them off dry food entirely after the big pet-food recall. It may just be that she’s been doing the equivalent of South Beach or Atkins for cats for close to a year now.

No need to panic unless the doctor comes up with a reason tomorrow. We need to remember that Boo is not a huge cat, at least as far as bone structure. Snark’s fairly muscular weight is still just around 8 pounds. Boo is currently at 9 pounds, 12 ounces.

The vet-tech did suggest fewer treats so that Boo would eat her normal food better. That will take care of itself when I am working offsite daily, I suspect. In the meantime, I will only ‘treat’ a couple times a day, and give only 2 or 3 Greenies instead of 5 or 6.

I know they can’t stay with us forever. Boo and Snark came to me as kittens in October and December of 1994. Someday they will pass on, and it’s likely to be within the next few years. Lots of domestic housecats who are primarily indoor cats live to be 16, 18, even 20 is not uncommon anymore. We’ll just be extra-good to them and hope for the best.

Cough. Ahem. I mean, they have a wide veriety of popular creatures, depicted as fat, fuzzy, balls of squee, err, um, as neotenous symbolic representations that invite tactile contact for primate reassurance. Huggable! Did we mention huggable!

I almost forgot the best part:

Pix 4 charity! For every picture of you smiling with your Squishable that we receive in the month of November, we’ll donate a dollar to Operation Smile. [a charity that helps children born with facial deformities receive corrective surgery– SRC] The more smiling faces, the more cash, up to $500.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and get your Squishable, and take a picture of you and your new buddy! Buy one for the helpdesk at your company– they need a mascot, preferably one that’s huggable, after dealing with you lot all day, every week!

Let the squishing begin!

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Squishables right now but I am planning to become a customer as soon as I start my holiday shopping! I know a Code Monkey or two who could use more hugs, for instance.

We have a new October holiday, the Boosterversary. It’s a celebration of the Booster, whose photo adorns our homepage. Not only did Boo come to live with me in October (of 1994, when she was just a teensy kitunia) but last year in October, she was LOST. She was out at dusk and ran off, and was missing for several days.

I did all the usual lost-cat things: posters, going out and calling, shaking kitty-treat bags, and so on. A national lost-pet listing service gave me a unique piece of advice that I hadn’t found via any other venue: put one of your shirts outside in your backyard, a shirt that you have worn. The smellier, the better– a gym shirt is ideal. The woman who told me this said that she had, over the years, had many reports of people finding their lost pet sitting on the shirt the very next morning. She said that a persistently “lost” pet was often hurt and hiding, and not daring to come out, but that the shirt would represent your protection and safety to the pet and embolden it to remain outside its hiding place in daylight.

My husband woke up before me the next day, looked out the window, and said “She’s there! Boo is outside!” He ran to the porch and opened the back door to let her in. She had been sitting on the shirt. I called the hotline back and reported her as “found”. She had a nasty two-puncture bite that we treated at the vet’s, but was otherwise clean, well-groomed, and tidy. Clearly she’d found someplace to comfortably hide out during the several days of her absence. She had been missing at least 3 nights, maybe 4, by then.

Absolutely marvelous dressage demonstration; also lovely for those of us with equine or ‘taur fursonas– how do horses dance? This mare is not just doing dressage, she seems to LIKE to dance! The freeze-frames one can do from this vid are great for getting tricky leg details right for art, too!